


For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky

by That Hoopy Frood (That_Hoopy_Frood)



Category: Half-Life
Genre: Angst, Astronomy, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Romance, Silent Protagonist, Yearning, why tf isn't yearning a tag, zine story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:54:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27804916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/That_Hoopy_Frood/pseuds/That%20Hoopy%20Frood
Summary: "We're all in the gutter; but some of us are looking at the stars." -- Oscar WildeIn which Gordon Freeman restores something long lost, and Alyx Vance returns the favor...ForQuantum Entanglement: a Freemance Charity Zine
Relationships: Gordon Freeman/Alyx Vance
Comments: 3
Kudos: 30





	For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky

**Author's Note:**

> I've been absolutely swamped by pandemic/Ph.D./personal problems and tons of other "P" words but I was so happy to have the opportunity to contribute to _Quantum Entanglement: a Freemance Charity Zine_! Our donation period just ended, and you can view the full zine [Here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/16QEA6NFKt1cMuOYfdeZ1eqcgqJQ4yBpB/view).

White Forest, according to the Vortigaunts, tended to average its autumn seasons into long, cold weeks of relentless fog and little color –– a mathematical set with a Roster enumeration consisting of every variation of _damp_. 

It had taken Gordon Freeman all of two days to see the sagacity in their assessment.

That evening, he had gorged himself on enough roasted headcrab to last him until the end of the world –– again –– or the end of his life... whichever came sooner. His hunger sated, Gordon took to pacing the perimeter of the base like the tiger at the Franklin Park Zoo.

A cold front had rumbled through the previous afternoon; the air was laden with the stench of sewers and mud. The forest was soaked to its roots — footpaths slimed with wet dirt, patrol berms churned to a shoe-sucking mire. Low storage sheds and armament dumps lined the tracks like outcroppings of wet bone: teeth in a death's head.

An empty outbuilding marked the northernmost corner of the grounds. It squatted in the junction of the stone sallyport, surrounded by a barricade of petrol drums. _Shed_ seemed too weak a term for the somber artifact. It looked more like a concrete mausoleum.

Gordon made a beeline for it.

The night beat with a slow, sedate pulse, the splash of Gordon's footfalls reminding him of cave slime dripping from a stalactite. The physicist huddled into his anorak; when Gordon glanced down, his reflection in the puddles was stooped and somber. Pale features stared back at him from the brackish surfaces: knobby frame, hesitant posture. An unfashionable, unkempt beard emphasizing sharp cheekbones and a long nose. Bottom-bottled spectacles which were, by some indefatigable miracle, still in one piece, albeit scuffed and smeared with God-knew-what…

When he drew level with the outbuilding, Gordon noticed a light coming from the roof, particles of mist floating in the fluorescence like diffuse atomic orbitals around a nucleus.

Gordon blotted the rain from his spectacles. Set against the fog, he distinguished the silhouette of a woman's head; he could just make out the curve of her nape beneath an upsweep of dark hair.

He wedged one foot against a rusted downspout and propped the other on a pile of crates. Grasping the gutter, he began to climb.

What was it she had said to him, back at Black Mesa East? _Being inside made her claustrophobic…_

Gordon pulled himself over the edge of the rooftop.

Alyx Vance sheltered from the rain beneath a sheet of corrugated tin, legs drawn to her chest, elbows resting on her knees. She wore a torch attached to a headband, the kind used by spelunkers. A carton of glass cathode tubes rested by her right shoe; as Gordon watched, Alyx dipped into the box, brought a cathode close to her face, and began to detach the electrode coil from the aluminium cap using a tiny jeweler's screwdriver.

She did not notice Gordon; her hazel eyes seemed to him uncharacteristically grave –– so intent upon the object of her focus she was blind to most everything and everyone else, Gordon included.

He was in no hurry to draw her attention.

Gordon stood stock-still, his arms resting on the rooftop, hardly caring that the rain was soaking through the elbows of his anorak. As Alyx continued to tinker, Gordon realized she was making adjustments to the cathode oscillator of her multitool. She cleared detritus from a resonance cavity before reattaching a cold cathode electrode to one end of the small metal box. The EMP wouldn't work without a flux compression generator, but Gordon knew Dr. Kleiner had a surfeit of aluminium tubes and reels of eight gauge copper wire gathering dust in his lab…

Gordon's gaze drifted from the multitool to Alyx's fingers as they turned the EMP components over, creating a mesmerizing ripple of muscle and tendon along the backs of her hands. Plenty distracted, Gordon swayed, and in an act of treachery, the edge of the rooftop threatened to slip from beneath him. Only when Gordon teetered did Alyx suddenly rise upright, all alert.

When she saw him, she relaxed, before propping her head on a closed fist.

"It's impolite to stare, Dr. Freeman."

Gordon blinked. He opened and closed his mouth like a particularly flummoxed goldfish. He pointed feebly at the ground and made as though to descend back down the pipe.

"Ah, jeez… I’m sorry. That was mean. Look," Alyx amended, "I’d love the company. Join me?"

Gordon inclined his head towards the sky, peering over the rims of his dew-speckled glasses.

"Don't tell me you're afraid of a little rain, Mr. _Opener of the Way_ ," she snarked, folding her arms against the cold. "Maybe we’ll get some thunder and lightning. Make you look all... I dunno, _dramatic_."

Sans HEV suit, Gordon Freeman was about as dramatic as dorm room ramen noodles. Still, he found himself warming to the atmosphere in spite of the circumstances, appreciative of a certain honest nihilism. The word in the German was _Götterdämmerung…_ Twilight of the Gods, or Dawn of the Gods. It depended on the translation.

Coming to the conclusion he was going to get the seat of his trousers damp no matter what he did, Gordon made himself comfortable on the other side of Alyx’s plastic drum. The rooftop was cold and clammy, but before Gordon could lament ruining Barney’s spare set of civvies, Alyx had scooted around the barrel and pressed herself quite unapologetically into Gordon’s side. Suddenly she was leaning on him, her small head resting on his shoulder, her hair dripping rainwater down his anorak.

Alarmed, Gordon lifted his hands as though to ease her away, but he couldn’t seem to recall how to bend his elbows. Or what he’d been doing the mere few minutes prior to climbing to the rooftop. Or what his own name was…

"You’re a lot comfier without that HEV suit, Doc."

Alyx’s caving lamp smelled like basalt baking in the sunshine. She was so warm, tucked against his throat…

Tension saturated the air between them, like the mildew percolating into the concrete. Gordon willed himself to breathe, to blink. His lungs felt tight, calling to mind the bruising force of being shot point-blank in the HEV's chestplate, but the rest of him… he couldn’t feel his legs. His toes. The tips of his fingers were numb, too.

 _Hydrogen_ , recited Gordon to himself, hands hovering in midair. _Helium, lithium, beryllium, boron…_

"That was good of Barney to lend you some clothes. Still, I’m sure he found a way to make a crass joke about it…" Alyx affected a passable impression: _"Well gee, Gordon, at least let me buy you dinner first."_

_First generation up and down... second generation charm and strange... third—_

"Though I’d keep an eye on the HEV suit if I were you," she nattered on, "unless you want a pair of mini guns or a chain sword or something. A certain Arne Magnusson’s been going on about making "adjustments" to the Mark V design… Dad says it's just like Dr. Magnusson's DARPA days back at Black Mesa..."

_Poor old Johnny Ray, sounded sad upon the radio; but he moved a million hearts in mono…_

Even trying to distract himself, Gordon apprehended the stillness of Alyx's body so close to his. He turned to find her looking askance at him, her head tipped to the side. She favored him with a small, almost shy smile.

Gordon had seen Alyx Vance looking unsure of herself on scant few occasions, and the novelty had a tendency to tug at some vague, itinerant emotions… none of which he could name, none of which he could, in his current state of mind –– of heart –– understand.

"You’re staring again, Gordon. Do I have something on my face?"

Yes, he thought stupidly. Freckles. A scar near your hairline. A faint smudge of motor oil on your cheek. A beautiful smile…

Alyx's eyes were so much lighter than his own, with only the faintest glimmer of green to betray they were not wholly hazel but a pale, vitreous gold.

Gordon glanced away, thoroughly embarrassed.

Alyx’s cheeks dimpled, touched by his sincerity and awkwardness. "Do you want me to scoot back over or––"

She didn't even finish the question before Gordon was shaking his head so fiercely he nearly knocked his glasses askew.

In the sudden silence, the electrical hum of Alyx's caving light sounded intrusive and loud, its irregular buzzing measuring out small parcels of time into which a word or a movement might perfectly fit... but none, despite Gordon's best efforts, did.

In the way that one fixed on one small detail with perfect clarity, the mind concentrating upon it in an attempt to block out everything else, Gordon found himself looking at Alyx’s hands. Her nails, gnawed short, were black with ash and scoria, her knuckles slick beneath a sheen of motor oil. Small, pale callouses rose in equidistant knobs on her palms, which were chapped and raw, like a sailor's thumb. The fierce white light of her headtorch showed every detail mercilessly, every last pore and pockmark revealed –– the history of a life, reduced to a hundred lines and a handful of scars.

One of Gordon's fingers curled to brush his palm, a swipe he was hardly aware of making until he registered the brief point of contact.

The skin of his hand was as smooth as plate glass.

 _"B-blood,"_ came an abrasive whisper near Gordon's ear, _"makes for... ah-an exceptional emollient... does it not, Dr. F-Freeman?"_

There was a certain knowing irony in the Voice that made the rhetorical question all the more lacerating.

Gordon grimaced, nausea gripping its claws into his stomach.

For a split second, a tall, gray figure appeared to crouch beside Alyx, starvation-hollow cheeks pinched in what would have been a smirk on any other face.

It disappeared as quickly as it appeared, leaving Gordon a riot of shivers beneath his civvies. He shook his head, attempting to dispel the image of those unblinking, vividly lambent eyes burning into the side of Alyx’s throat like a pair of welding torches…

The Man was sometimes distant and aloof, and other times –– times when Alyx was involved, for one –– far too close for comfort. It emerged from the shadows of doorways and lurked behind blind corners, full of hidden gestures and rhinal, insinuating whispers.

Gordon knew well enough by now that the hard currency of his sponsor's insights had been indefinitely withdrawn from circulation. And yet, in the teeth of all its mysteries, the Gray Man was unfailingly shrewd. For all its promises and paradoxes spoken in stereo, echoing in the dark, the Man understood something innate in the human condition –– comprehended, as only an outsider could, some essential ethos in their patterns of behavior.

By comparison, Gordon’s own reckoning with his humanity –– or lack of it –– corresponded to merely provisional definitions, all of which were riddled with gaps, mottled with rot, soaked in blood…

Blood on his hands.

_Blood on his smooth, lethal hands…_

For Gordon, regret did not amount to an assumption of responsibility or a reconciling of himself to the destruction, but rather to a complete, twisted denial of how utterly powerless he had been to prevent the events that had culminated in the Resonance Cascade, the decimation of the human race, the rape of the Earth by the Combine. That had, in their aggregation, landed Alyx –– and him along with her –– on a freezing rooftop, tinkering with alien technology, dripping with rain, gray with exhaustion, huddled beneath a sky without stars.

Regret was a toothless salve; like the morphine of the HEV suit, analgesia dulled the pain, but it did little to mend cracked bones or broken bodies.

Retreating to rooftops. Roosting in gables. Peering like a carved grotesque down at the minutiae of the world. Gordon realized, with the sobering clarity of someone who, wandering in a mist, managed to stop himself mere inches from a cliff edge, that he had been running away all his life. An escape from panic into desperation, from desperation to guilt, from guilt and self-punishment into pure reason, because over time the emotions, whether they were joy or sorrow, grief or love, registered so deep and sharp that in the end they left feeling him raw and hurting.

In objectivity, in rationality, in running away resided a certain selfish, prevenient comfort.

His had been a life of retreat after retreat, as if the Gray Man was, in its own peculiar fashion, steering Gordon towards an almost simple-minded acceptance of things as they were, even if the rationale remained unfathomable and inconceivable. There was nothing he could do except secure a tenacious grip on things that were still tangible, at which point Gordon came to understand that if there was any inherent sense to the world it far transcended his own.

It was enough to merely notice and observe that which he actually possessed, and distance himself from the rest.

_Distance himself from the rest._

Gordon had tried, so many times, to produce something ostensibly orderly out of the chaos which rendered ordinary life so haphazard. The physicist, bereft of a card catalogue of formulae, could not establish a vantage from which chance might begin to look like logic. And despite his efforts to understand and experience what precisely his friends wanted from each other, from him, from themselves, Gordon continued to confront the slow tide of human affairs with a benign incomprehension, dispassionately and without any sense of personal involvement.

Sequences of figures and equations spinning in a sluggish halation, possibilities and statistics in continuously faltering assessments.

Panic into desperation, desperation into guilt, guilt into pure reason.

_Distance himself from the rest._

A wave of upset washed over him, then... the stale odor of it drying instantly on his skin like isopropyl. Gordon touched his beard nervously, seizing clumps between his fingers and tugging. He repeated the ritual endlessly, as though to reassure himself of something. The hairs bristled tediously against his palm.

Blood on his hands.

_Distance himself from the rest._

"Hey."

Alyx’s head shifted. Her gaze brushed his in a curious little gesture, full of concern. A caress without touch –– achingly kind, desperately gentle. Her knuckles slid against his.

"It’s okay… you’re okay."

Then her small hand was in his large one, her palm pressed against his. Slowly, he let their fingers entwine.

Alyx settled closer to Gordon, snuggling her head into the crook of his shoulder.

"Stay with me," she murmured, exhaling against his jaw.

He felt again that surge of emotion beneath his sternum, bringing an ache to his throat. Something nameless yet essential stirred in his chest: it wasn’t a feeling of great depth. It didn’t bear down Gordon’s bones or make thinking clearly an effort but it felt vast in some way he could not wholly articulate, stretching beyond an endless sea of secret and nameless sufferings and anguishes and yearnings.

_Distance himself from the rest distance himself from the rest distance himself from the rest distance himself from the rest distance––_

"It gets sore when it rains," Alyx mumbled, for a moment emptying her voice of all inflection.

She huddled into his embrace, shielding herself against the night. Gordon couldn't help but notice her confining every motion to her head and shoulders, a stiff sway of her upper body; her abdomen stayed very still.

Alyx's free hand strayed to the space right below her breasts, kneading the muscle tenderly.

The pair of ragged, rusty holes in her sweatshirt glared at Gordon with naked accusation.

All the while, Alyx stared into the distance, towards the base of the mountainside and the remnants of Victory Mine. A few flames still flickered in the oil slicks and radioactive sludge, but there was little left to burn.

Gordon closed his eyes, but all he saw in the dark recesses of his mind were vivid impressions of their flight through the mines following the portal storm: Alyx's pale, pain-grim face; her hands pawing at a pair of bloody perforations in her midsection; going boneless in the Vortigaunt's arms; and, ultimately, unmindful of the creature in the blue suit whispering promises and poison into her ear…

_Distance... distance…_

Alyx had nearly died that day, and Gordon had nearly gone mad in his panic, his frenzied mind breaking its teeth on invisible bars like a skeleton in a starvation cage. He had learned, throughout their ordeal, that there were some shocks that came so quickly and struck so deep that the blows were internalized well before they were registered by the flesh. That certain horrors operated on a register above sheer, bloody-minded terror, like scanning a radio in the dead of night and tuning in to a wavelength barely above the static, voices muttering in a brutal language that human tongues were never meant to speak, much less human hearts to bear.

A line had been crossed in Victory Mine that could never be uncrossed –– a running leap over a chasm of ignorance and passive separation and into life's endless possibilities for grief and heartache that could no more be unlearned than one's first instinct to breath and blink. That could no more be disentangled than their vortal coils…

Gordon shook his head, resolving not to close his eyes again.

"The Vorts were making a fuss," Alyx offered him. She was being offhand about it, which wasn't so far removed from how Alyx usually acted about her own self-preservation, but never before had her disregard registered so... false.

Effort ain't worth a hill of beans, Barney might have said. Gordon was inclined to agree.

"It was getting crowded in there," she went on, feigning a lack of interest with just a little too much affected nonchalance to be entirely convincing. "After I told Dad what happened, he had me stop by the infirmary to get the scars checked out. They gave me a clean bill of health and told me to kick back and take it easy for a few days."

She barely managed a few hours, noted Gordon.

"But word spreads fast in Vortigese, I guess," said Alyx grudgingly. She paused, the words faltering. "Every two minutes, it was another Vort, going on about tapestries and Vortessence… _almost vortal, this bond between you_ … you know how they are."

Indeed he did. Gordon managed to arrange his expression into something suitably sympathetic. He squeezed her hand.

"I dunno... it got to be a lot after a while," Alyx confessed. "They wouldn’t leave me alone. I needed some space to think. I needed some time alone."

Gordon jerked to attention, as though someone had fired a pistol near his ear.

"Oh, I didn’t mean––!" Alyx frowned so fiercely the architecture of her face crumpled. "Really putting my foot in my mouth tonight, huh? What I meant to say was… there's no one I'd rather be alone with, Gordon. I sort of..." she smiled shyly, "I sort of hoped you'd find me up here."

She let the silence punctuate her statement. For a long moment, they breathed in tandem, as if they shared a pulse, a train of thought, a common sense. The headtorch bleached the red glint in Alyx’s hair and washed clean the sharp contours of her face. The blacks of her eyes were bright.

"You know, Barney mentioned that you used to do stuff like this... when you were upset or… or just needed your space. That you even had a favorite rooftop, back at Black Mesa."

Gordon grimaced, rubbing the back of his neck self-consciously. _Running away…_

"When we were living in base housing, Dad let me stay up late to see the Cassiopeid meteor shower," she said. "We… Mom and him and I… we sat out on the fire escape."

There was a moment of reverential silence.

"I… I don't remember what they look like, Gordon," she confessed quietly. "I used to know all the constellations by heart. But now I... I don't remember the stars at all."

Gordon glanced up at the sky, bloated with brackish yellow clouds, like the stomach of a corpse gone feverish with rot. Darkness from the bottom up, suffocating the life in the forest first and then circling into smog and clouds until the black stretched up so high that nobody could even remember what the night sky used to look like… the Combine, reveling in their destructive decadence, had seeded the upper atmosphere with millions of tons of sulfur and other heavy metals — a firmament of shadows, a lossless substrate, where nothing ever changed or grew.

All that poison, all that pollution... the stars didn’t stand a chance.

"It's like this or worse every night. And day. I haven't seen stars since I was a little girl… and the sun only occasionally. I feel as though I… as though we’ve all lost something..."

They had lost the Earth, certainly, despite Eli’s best efforts to win it back, piece by hard-fought piece.

And yet Gordon couldn’t help but suspect Alyx was not talking about the Earth at all…

A few generations of living and dying without a sky, and even open spaces were wont to take on the primal terror of premature burial.

The roof of the world was black, and the stars had gone dark.

The Combine had taken them away from her…

Gordon leapt to his feet so suddenly he nearly sent Alyx careening into the plastic drum.

"Gordon! What––"

He gestured towards one of the empty ballistic missile silos across the base –– the long, L-shaped exhaust building and circular hatch the only indications of the cylindrical structure below-ground.

Alyx darted an apprehensive glance in the direction of Gordon’s outstretched hand.

"The SM-3 silo? What do you need that for..."

Gordon held up two fingers, growing increasingly animated even as Alyx looked further bemused.

"You..." she scrunched her nose. Leveraging herself to her feet, Alyx began to pull her hair back and tie it off. "You want me to meet you at the silo in two...?"

Gordon jerked his thumb skyward, no longer showing any of the wary reserve of recent minutes.

"Two hours? What on earth are you up to, Gordon..." She gave him an enigmatic look that might have been surprise at his sudden excitement or annoyance at his inability to make even a lick of sense. Or both, in equal or lesser measure. "If Dr. Magnusson catches us poking around one of the silos he'll be apoplectic––uhh, Gordon… What are you doing…?"

Gordon had swooped beside her on his way towards the edge of the roof. Alyx looked up at him –– for he was half a head taller –– and though her expression was merely contemplative, and her manner innocently bemused, Gordon registered the gooseflesh erupting on the back of his neck, the blood beginning to drum in his ears like distant thunder as he bent down, cleared a strand of hair from her face, and kissed Alyx firmly on the cheek.

His beard abraded like a Brillo pad. His breath probably reeked of headcrab.

And yet Gordon felt an absurd rush of satisfaction at seeing Alyx Vance go redder than a Vortigaunt's eyeball. Flashing two fingers at her and grinning like an idiot, Gordon began his descent down the gutter pipe.

He had some preparations to make.

 _"D-distance... yourself from the ressst, Dr. F-Freeman,"_ warned a Voice at his back.

Shut up, thought Gordon vehemently.

* * *

**Later**

The shadows darkened and shifted; high above Gordon’s head, the spotlight of the silo hatch seemed to fade in and out of existence. Blackness bleed from the edges of the barrel chamber, darkening the cobwebbed service elevators and accumulated bric-a-brac of cannibalized warheads and fuel. Inverse lightning, a concerto of chiaroscuro.

Gordon reveled in a silence so profound that he felt as though his every breath was percussing against a solid object, a material space without shape nor boundary. Anaximander's apeiron. Beyond his apprehension, it hummed as sweetly as a struck crystal. Full of resonance and implication, a tension at the cusp of shattering––

"Okay, Gordon, it's been two hours. You made a very compelling argument––" Gordon felt the tips of his ears go hot, and was immensely thankful Alyx couldn't see him from her vantage–– "but I'm kinda looking to turn in for the night."

He heard Alyx take a mincing step forward, the echo reverberating around the silo as she passed between the broken pediments to the basin of the barrel chamber. Her foot caught on something in the gloom and she muttered a curse under her breath.

When he judged her close enough, Gordon threw the switch on the load center.

Around them, a universe winked into existence.

Hundreds of tiny, battery-operated lights bespattered the cylindrical walls, tumbling upwards into infinity like gold coins thrown into the air. Stars girdled the interior of the barrel chamber, hanging from bent coat hangers, cellotaped to the handrails and stuck to the walls with birdlime.

Soon, whole constellations emerged as the filaments warmed and the resistance increased, as if they were bobbing up to the gray surface of the concrete like bioluminescent plankton caught in the water column.

The whole silo was soon filled with the lights of a thousand celestial forges, flickering with the compulsion of astronomical scintillation. Layer upon layer of calculated cosmological configurations, like a vast nervous system, heads and spines and wings and weapons spanning nearly the entirety of a hemisphere... Draco, a circumpolar constellation that contained the north pole of the ecliptic. Sagittarius, wherein lay the the most plausible candidate for the location of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. Ophiuchus, the Serpent Bearer, the mythical healer Asclepius holding a snake...

_And the stars glittered, a fistfill of flipped coins caught in the apex of the toss, suspended above the television aerials and skylights and ugly industrial miscellany. The diaphanous swath of Milky Way arced luxuriantly from horizon to horizon, the distant glow of Las Cruces backlighting the clouds as if they’d been drawn there in charcoal. The moon slunk behind the spires of the Organs like a wounded animal. Dust blew past in ribbons, sand and alkali grit soothing the miles and miles of barren New Mexico desert with all the quiet cleanliness of new-fallen snow…_

"Gordon… I…"

Gordon turned to Alyx, surveying her expression, too large to miss, even in the gloom… eyes wide, jaw slack. There were tears on her cheeks.

"Those are… you used cold cathode electrodes..."

Then she simply stared, too stunned and surprised to move or speak, caught in the throes of some vague, subconscious vertigo; it was difficult even to think of the sensation in terms of description, let alone find the words to actually recount it.

The nearest intuitions Gordon had managed on his own had always come from sitting under the night sky –– a lone dweller upon an errant planet beneath a firmament of chipped-glass stars. His ability, in those moments, to imagine, to dream –– to summon into reality a belief in the indomitability of the human spirit –– arose from pure natural philosophy as much as the candor of his own enthusiasm.

Retreat. Escape. Daedalus and Icarus, tempted by a vast shining machine of beautiful complexity, in equal measures humbling and exhilarating. A million solar systems born every hour; meteorites arcing to Earth invisibly all day long; stars gleaming in the ebony vastness like fireflies trapped on a roll of rosin-coated paper.

The rooftops, with their unobstructed views of the night sky, were not merely sanctuaries to which Gordon and Alyx could retreat in order to escape the terrestrial ills of deadening routines and confining expectations and complicated people. They were not an abstract possibility of escape, but rather the concrete condition in which they had both been granted the license to imagine other worlds, other possibilities.

Gordon had been trained in astronomy; he had learned the ways in which constellations consented to being stripped of their names, given numbers, and regimented into standardized grids of planetary positions and ephemerides. But there were a great many stars segregated from the constellations, and nothing to stop him from drawing the lines in a thousand different directions to create a thousands different pictures. Many identities, over time, becoming alignments involved in some deeper allegiance... an order and relationship existing within the discrete worlds of above and below. Logical in darkness and logical in radiance, as logical on Earth as it was in heaven, a long asymptotic symmetry among the vastness. Mathematics and magic, both.

The stars were uncorrupted. Decent. Transcendent. Resonating into the remote future and far beyond the Earth.

Hopeful.

Perhaps, thought Gordon, Alyx Vance reminded him of the stars because she was so much like them…

For a moment, he remembered Xen: he had clung to the islands of the border world as the stars whirlpooled above him; the constellations seen from Earth, even in New Mexico, had been miserable and pale by comparison. The stars over Xen were shamelessly, fiercely bright, burning in red, green, purple and gold. A nebula of interstellar gases had stained the sky directly over Gordon’s head, the very air diffused with smoky blue and pink from the distant torches of gas giants and quasars. Silhouetted figures had darted across the blaze of colored chondrite clouds, white meteors carving incandescent ambits against the radiance. Above it all, the sodium brilliance of the Nihilanth's chamber had guttered like a candle in a draught.

For a brief, beautiful, horrifying moment, Gordon had been the center point around which the reckless universe spun.

And now, standing in the belly of the silo, it was as though Gordon himself were coming apart, like Xen’s dying stars flinging ionized hydrogen into the infinite darkness. He was a splintering galaxy, a slow motion annihilation with Alyx at the aphelion: her warmth, her wit, her tenacity in a splintered wreck of a world determined to grind the human spirit to ash, a radical and profound kindness evident not overwhelmingly in spite of her imperfections, but because of them. 

Alyx stared at the silo in still, awe-stricken surprise, shock absconding with her voice. Her eyes glittered and her face went soft, and in an instant Gordon saw a depth of emotion that seemed to mirror that he hardly recognized in himself... until he saw it in her. 

Gordon loved her, then... completely, fiercely, and with every part of his being. Even with his broken parts, the parts that were burnt, and scarred, and scared, and hurting, and just terribly, terribly lonely.

Perhaps... with those parts most of all.

Gordon didn’t know when he started crying with her; he only grew wise to his shoulders shaking under the force of it. Alyx had never let herself be so vulnerable, and Gordon had never felt this burning and unending tenderness, so consuming he might collapse from the gravitational potential: stellar nucleosynthesis shuddering under iron’s weight.

Alyx managed a weak, watery laugh. She ran her hand across her tear-streaked face and through her straggled and filthy hair.

"Jeez," she chuckled, "how many of Dr. Magnusson's pet projects did you have to cannibalize to get the parts?"

Gordon beamed. It felt tight and a little painful, too large for his mouth.

Perhaps to be on a rooftop, to lay naked and vulnerable before the motes of diamond dust in an infinite midnight, and to feel awe, or wonder, or terror, in the presence of the universe's astonishing mystery, was nothing more than a recovery of a misplaced syllogism, a fundamental cosmic logic, prevented by protest or defiance or despair from being seen in ordinary hours.

All the while, mystery vaguely stirred in Alyx's eyes, her gaze firing the motes of dust like rays of sunshine, like supernovae in the darkness. Gordon had seen her expression dark with brooding anger and as cold as ice, veiled with apprehension and fractured in fear.

But never before had he seen them full of joy and disbelief, and an almost frightened wonder.

Perhaps an understanding of the highest condition available in the order of things resided in Alyx Vance's eyes.

Perhaps beholding the stars was like watching Alyx working with her cathodes –– extraordinary, inexhaustible, triumphant, unconquerable beauty working to bring matters to some semblance of comprehension.

Perhaps, by Alyx's grace, Gordon Freeman might find his answers.

**Author's Note:**

> My undying gratitude to the supremely talented [Rory](https://rxryp.tumblr.com) for the gorgeous illustration of Gordon and Alyx


End file.
